A Fine Balance | Rohinton Mistry | "A Fine Balance Between Hope and Despair"

A Fine Balance | Rohinton Mistry | Brilliant

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A Fine Balance

	A Fine Balance Rohinton Mistry Vintage Books, 1997 average customer review:based on 561 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

"A Fine Balance Between Hope and Despair"

One of the most captivating of the books I've read this month, "A Fine Balance" brilliantly captures the essence of a poverty-stricken city within a politically unstable India of the 1970s. The story is set mostly during the two-year State of Emergency (comparable to martial law), which began in 1975 when protests against the government were used as an excuse for the prime minister to hold on to power. It centers on four individuals - Dina Dalal, a Parsi widow who's struggling to make ends meet; Manek Kohlah, a sensitive college student and Dina's boarder; Ishvar Mochi, a tailor of immense patience and perseverance; and Omprakash Mochi, Ishvar's nephew. Needing a dependable income, Dina takes in sewing and hires Ishvar and Om as tailors. Much of the novel is about the hardships of Ishvar and Om and their histories, as well as those of Dina's and Manek's. Most poignant are the interwoven events that created a "family" out of these disparate individuals.

The city where the four reside is unnamed throughout, but from descriptions can be assumed to be Mumbai (Bombay). Many references are also made to a nameless prime minister (a she), obviously Indira Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru's daughter who was PM from 1966 to 1977, and then again from 1980 to 1984 when she was assassinated. The reader quickly realizes that Mr. Mistry is highly critical of Mrs. Gandhi's government and policies.

Mr. Mistry's sweep is wide--the story encompasses tumultuous political times and periods of immense social upheavals, depicting a democracy that is "at the best of times...a seesaw between complete chaos and tolerable confusion." Each chapter incorporates these, adding much depth and realism to the story and its characters. There are many cultural issues and historical events that serve as backdrops, and some historical figures alluded to--the long outlawed and rigid caste system; the 1947 partition which created the separate republics of India and Pakistan; graft and corruption; forced sterilization; slums; forced slave labor; the Mahatma, Mohandas Gandhi; violence and discrimination against the lower caste chamaar (the untouchables); and grinding poverty just to name a few.

The suffering, misfortune and misery (to refer to the characters' experiences as challenges would be a gross understatement) depicted here are relentless and those averse to stories of insurmountable poverty and pain should best avoid this. Life as depicted in the unforgiving streets of Mumbai is "...but a sequence of accidents--a clanking chain of chance events...a string of choices, casual or deliberate, which add up to that one big calamity..." relieved only momentarily by humor and the brief visit of good luck. Mistry does not sugarcoat anything and as unpalatable as the facts of his native country in that time period were, they were what they were.

Curious if the characters' lives are somewhat exaggerated, I consulted a friend, a charming Hindu lady in her 70s and of the higher caste, kshatriya. Her recollections do lend credence to the suffering of the untouchables depicted here, but one thing is a curiosity to her. As a believer of Krishna, she insists that love and respect, at least during her youth in India, were above the dictates of caste. Evidently, the villains of Mr. Mistry's story are of differing opinion and the tailors whose never-ending rounds of ill fortune may very well have been composites of the countless poor and disenfranchised.

It's a magnificent novel, really, and its story is quite fascinating. It was my welcome companion for several evenings (it's a bit over 600 pages) and its characters became dramatic fixtures in this reading ritual. From the first page, they ceased to be merely figments of a writer's imagination, but rather real people whose lives I saw unfold and whose conversations I eavesdropped on. This is not just for someone whose interest is piqued by South Asian history, but also for those who see fiction as a means to better understand the human spirit and its capacity to endure. The author's use of a Balzac quote that refers to Le Père Goriot creates an association that is justifiable. "A Fine Balance," like Goriot, is a 'human comedy,' one of corruption and greed, the kind whose toll is too high by anyone's standard.

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Brilliant

From its first page to its last, AFB is a marvel. RH paints a world in meticulous and breath-taking detail. Even at 600 pages, not one sentence of this novel is superfluous. AFB reads quickly and absorbingly. But it is no easy read: the stuff of this novel is the stuff of tragedies, great and small, and often unimaginable. I have no doubt of the realism, the 'authenticity', of the story RH tells. If I emerged scathed and scarred from reading it, I also emerged the wiser. No novel has so deeply immersed me in another culture and in other lives as this one did. I cannot begin to do it justice in a brief review.

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